Every year at the end of June, the United States Supreme Court session comes to a close and the Court’s long-awaited rulings are announced before the justices adjourn for the summer. This summer’s end of session docket is especially packed, and the Court has been busy deciding some consequential cases.

Pro-life America celebrated a landmark Supreme Court anniversary last Saturday: one year since the ruling of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that overturned Roe v. Wade. This decision took the power to write abortion laws away from the Court and gave it back to the states - where it belongs. As I’ve said before, every pro-abortion American in this country had a mother who chose life. While it is heartbreaking how many innocent lives have been taken across the country since Roe v. Wade was decided, last summer’s ruling was monumental and will save millions and millions of innocent lives moving forward.

Possibly the longest awaited Supreme Court ruling of this year was announced this week: whether or not the Biden Administration can simply “forgive” student loans with its own plan that hasn’t been approved by Congress. The Court’s decision confirmed what my colleagues and government officials on both sides of the aisle have been saying all along: the President does not have the authority to simply forgive debt owed to the taxpayers without authorization from Congress. 87 percent of Americans don’t have student loan debt. Forcing them to foot the bill for the 13 percent that do is completely wrong. But the Administration’s action was never about education or helping Americans - it was a stunt to appease a specific liberal voting block before the 2022 election. Now, the Americans who believed the President and stopped their loan payments are years behind. They’re now in a position to restart their payments at a time when the cost of everything else they buy is near an all-time high thanks to Democrats’ disastrous fiscal policy. 

Yesterday, we got another monumental ruling on racial discrimination in higher education. The Supreme Court found that Harvard and the University of North Carolina admissions programs were in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Following the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to all people “born or naturalized in the United States” and guaranteed all Americans “equal protection under the law.” So, these schools will no longer be able to discriminate against applicants based on their race. As Chief Justice John Roberts said, universities have “concluded wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of this skin.” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurrence, “[w]hile I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law." Students can certainly continue to speak about their life experience and how their race has shaped them as a person in essays or personal statements, but this ruling seeks to make the college admissions process about the individual, not about a box they check on their application.

The Supreme Court’s duty is to ensure that our nation’s laws align with the Constitution and maintain our rights. Whether or not we agree with their rulings - I've certainly disagreed with many in the past - it is up to our elected representatives in government to write and change laws. I’m pleased that most of the recent rulings have reinforced the Constitutional rights of a citizen government.